Unfortunately, no, not really. They are absolutely able and willing to confiscate your devices at any time once you’re on Chinese soil, and once you’ve lost physical control, that’s the end of trust for that device. Even beyond that, it’s not unheard of for there to be vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc that make your device susceptible to wireless attacks. IMO it’s not worth the risk.

Here is just one example of this type of thing uncovered by The Guardian, New York Times, and others in a joint investigation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/chinese-border-guards-surveillance-app-tourists-phones

Do not bring your normal personal devices to China. They are notorious for injecting spyware on foreign devices at every opportunity. Use a freshly formatted device and create all new accounts to use with it.

Regarding services: do not use self-hosted services unless you you spin up fresh, isolated instances of your services for use while abroad and spin them down afterwards, including formatting any OS they were hosted on.

Regarding VPN: because we are assuming that any device used in China is compromised, do not connect to your VPN unless you have set up a segregated VLAN and are connecting through a VPN server instance created specifically for use while in China.

Basically, assume anything you use in China is compromised. And assume your connections are being monitored. And assume that any device you are connecting to from China is at risk of being compromised. So everything needs to be segregated from the rest of your network and set up specifically to be deleted after you’re back home.

Hahaha I figured something like but couldn’t resist the opportunity :D

For those following along: SEAWATER IS NOT SALINE EITHER. Just making sure we’re clear on everything

It is important to note that while a FICO score is roughly equivalent to “trustworthiness”, the three credit agency scores (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) are NOT meant to reflect your trustworthiness directly. Rather, they are specifically designed to inform lenders of your profitability for them.

It’s an important distinction because having a an outstanding payment history alone won’t improve these scores, if you aren’t utilizing available credit and maintaining some running balance with lenders.

Basically, if you’re just going to borrow money and never pay any interest on the loans, you aren’t actually a source of profit and therefore aren’t a desirable customer for lenders and creditors

My solution for this type of situation is MicroBin running on my home network from a non-standard port, with a port knocker to open and close the port when needed.

My router handle DDNS so I can always contact my home network easily. I port-knock to trigger an iptables command on the router to forward traffic to the MicroBin host.

I also have my phone set up to connect via openvpn to my home network so that I can remotely do things like start and stop services, set port forwarding rules, etc.

So I’m Federated, So What?

Definitely this one lol

Precisely

Truck-kun trying to make a new fediverse themed anime

Reincarnated to Save Social Media

I mean to say that the connection attempt is failing because the traffic is never reaching the server.

There is no traffic on Port 8081 in those logs

Yeah your iptables is already set to up ACCEPT by default meaning no blocking.

My next step would be to determine whether the traffic is reaching the target machine. Look into how you can monitor inbound traffic and verify whether the server even sees the inbound connection attempt

First obvious question: do you have a firewall enabled?

From a terminal, type “iptables -L” and if there are any rules there (rather than just category headers) you will probably need to allow inbound traffic through the firewall

I didn’t read that as “he didn’t realize those things” but as “he didn’t think he’d care as much as he did”. Like, it’s easy to say “I could go without X” but actually doing it is different. That’s a universally true experience that seems more likely than “Kevin Bacon thought average people get to skip lines and have strangers say I love you”

If that were the case then the other statements within bullet 1 are completely irrelevant, and the relevant information has been omitted. That would be a far greater assumption than taking the statements at face value and connecting the information we have into coherent logic

TBH that’s a logic fail on your part.

In bullet point (1) we have two important statements

Statement A: “I can’t make the food”

Followed immediately by the explanation…

Statement B: “I am dealing with an illness that makes me unable to eat solid foods and extremely sensitive to smells”

The only way Statements A and B can be related is via the smell. Being unable to EAT solid foods wouldn’t prevent OP from MAKING the food. The only possible explanation is that the sensitivity to smell is what makes them unable.

That’s, like, really basic reading comprehension skills. 🤷

Oh boy, let’s take this piece by piece…

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

First: let’s talk about the difference between copyright, patents, and trademark

A patent protects a method of doing something - like a novel piece of code, or a newly invented drug formula - from being duplicated and used or sold without your consent.

Copyright protects creative works - like art, books, and computer software - from being mimiced. It literally deals with the rights to copy something

Trademark protects brands - like a logo or company name - from being used by other people for profit. It usually deals with marketplace confusion, as when someone creates a competing product with a similar logo to try to benefit from the logo’s recognition and popularity.

So, with that said, what are YOU dealing with?

Well, since you’re not selling software or utilizing anything from the WatchDogs game universe, you’re pretty much free and clear on both patent and copyright.

What about trademark?

Well, on the one hand, you are not competing with Ubisoft in any way, nor are you attempting to represent yourself as related to WatchDogs. So, by the letter of the law (in the US), they don’t have a valid complaint.

However, trademark under US law has this funny feature where an entity that holds a trademark is required to vigorously defend it when they become aware of potential infringement. This is to prevent the selective application of trademark. That is, if I know John is using my trademark and I don’t go after him, then Steve uses my trademark too, I can’t suddenly claim to have an interest in defending it when I didn’t care before. Steve can point at the fact that I didn’t go after John and say “you already gave up your trademark by failing to enforce it”.

So how does this impact you? Well, unfortunately, even if you are technically allowed to use “dedsec” under US law, if Ubisoft has a trademark on the term “dedsec” specifically, AND if someone at Ubisoft became aware of your use of their trademark, they would likely come after you for trademark infringement just to cover their ass. You might even win in court, but it would cost a whole lot of money that you would likely never be able to recover.

The good news is that the very first step in a trademark dispute is a cease and desist letter. They’ll demand you stop using their trademark. At that point you can either comply, refuse, or offer to settle the matter by selling them the domain.

What you do with this information is up to you.

Security professional here. This is legit a good call on their part. It’s because those types of addresses won’t bounce emails but aren’t necessarily in your control; it’s very, very easy to spam those petition forms with mail@ for a million real domains without bouncing the emails, making them seem legit.

You own your domain, obviously, so it’s really as simple as creating a forwarding/alias address of “changeorg@domain.tld”. If creating a forwarding/alias address is that much of a problem for you I suggest that you likely shouldn’t be hosting your own email in the first place.

Your laziness isn’t a good reason to be upset with a company taking steps to reduce their security overhead significantly